Articles

Business Incubation

Business Linkages

From Oil to Tech

Innovation in Agriculture

Ultimate Developer

Business Incubation

In poultry farming (broilers and layers), one of the most critical success factor is having a good quality day-old-chicks. The quality of the day-old-chick is greatly dependent on the quality of the hatchable or fertile eggs, which in turn depends on the quality of the parent or grandparent stock that produced the eggs. In poultry business, the production of day-old-chick is done by hatcheries, sourcing hatchable eggs from reputable breeder farms. The hatcheries have industrial egg incubators for incubating the eggs in to day-old-chicks.

The incubation process is in two stages namely, incubation and hatching. The incubation stage requires controlled temperature and humidity with oxygen, constant air flow and continuous turning of the eggs at regular intervals to exercise the developing embryos. The hatching stage requires lesser temperature and higher humidity without turning of the eggs. Deviation from any of these parameters or conditions leads to poor quality of day-old-chicks or poor hatchability. The hatching stage usually requires a different machine called a hatcher, similar to an egg incubator but with hatching condition or parameters. Some egg incubators have dual configuration therefore, can be switched to the hatching condition automatically.

Have you observed a local hen incubate her eggs naturally? The process is the same, but the equipment this time is the hen doubling as the incubator and the hatcher. The hen mates with a cock and lays her eggs in a hidden, safe and cool place. When the eggs gets to the number the hen can accommodate under her wings, it starts to incubate the eggs. During this process the hen seats on the eggs to control the temperature and humidity of the air enveloped around the eggs by the wings and the feather. The hen’s feather is a lagging or insulating material for conserving heat and regulating temperature and humidity. The hen runs out on few occasions to feed and defecate, and then rushed back to seat on the eggs to avoid the adverse effect of low atmospheric temperature on the embryos. During the hatching stage, the hen wets her feather in water to increase the humidity required for the chicks to peep and hatch.

You can see the similarities between using an egg incubator to hatch eggs and allowing the hen to hatch her eggs naturally. It is clear that the condition for a successful hatching of healthy chicks using the two processes cannot be fast tracked otherwise the quality will be compromised.

Similarly, business incubation is a process of incubating start-ups in the right environment with the right conditions using the right process to create sustainable start-ups.

A business incubator is a company that helps new and start-ups companies to develop by providing services such as management training or office space. It is a catalyst tool for either regional or national economic development. Business incubators are in five categories: academic institutions; non-profit development corporations; for-profit property development ventures; venture capital firms, and combination of the above. Business incubators differ from research and technology parks in their dedication to start-up and early-stage companies. Research and technology parks, on the other hand, tend to be large-scale projects that house everything from corporate, government or university labs to very small companies. Most research and technology parks do not offer business assistance services, which are the hallmark of a business incubation program. However, many research and technology parks house incubation programs.

You may ask yourself, why do we need business incubation? The simple answer is, to produce sustainable start-ups that are well informed and are ready for the challenges of the harsh business environment. How many eggs do you think a single hear can hatch? Well, I have neither seen nor heard of a single hen hatching up to 20 chicks from her own eggs. This simply implies that the natural incubation process is not scalable for commercial production. A single incubator can hatch thousands of eggs in one set with constant quality.

Start-ups requires business incubation to build a strong foundation for smart business scaling. Take for example, a software developer, having a sound technical skill on developing software solutions with up-to-date professional certifications. The technical skill does not guarantee running a profitable and sustainable business. Technical skill is one stage, entrepreneurship skills is another stage and Business Linkage is yet another stage. Business that pass through an incubation process have a high presentable of success than those that do not.

In the technology space, there is a big disconnect in transforming ideas into products that sell. Products developers skip, ignore or are ignorant of the stages they MUST pass through to create and run a successful start-up. This is the gap ICEHub has been able to bridge over the years. Our incubation program integrates solution development, engineering designs, entrepreneurship skills development and business linkages to enhance the ecosystem in Port Harcourt and Nigeria as a whole.

We provide the core programing skills, other technical competence and intellectual property protection required for developers and makers. We also provide a complete mind-set reorientation passing start-ups through our Entrepreneurship and Skills Development Program (ESDP) at E&I Centre and South-South Entrepreneurship Development Centre (SSEDC) after which we provide business linkages. A start-up founder with sound technical skill and entrepreneurship skill can create and run a start-up, but what makes the business sustainable is Business Linkages which provides access to the right market at all time. Once there is a market for a good quality product, there will be sales and exchange of values which leads to repeat sales.

At ICEHub, we develop start-up founders to have a mind-set of no limitations, no excuses, and an entrepreneur with a cause, here to serve the needs of our world using their creativity. We know that opportunities are wrapped in challenges, this is why our delivery model helps unlock the entrepreneurial competences in individuals to discover the opportunities. ICEHub is like a safe house in the harsh business environment. A fertile egg place on the floor of a room will not hatch because the room condition is too harsh for hatching. The same egg will hatch in the same room when place inside an incubator in the room. This is the role that business incubators play in our harsh business environment. Even when susses is attained, we encourage start-ups to be proactive and strategic by supporting them with our Business Linkage Programs (PIND BLI).

When you are in the desert, do not look for water to drink, but look for water to sell. By so doing, you will have enough water at your disposal. We take individuals through our well-orchestrated idea generation module for individual to discover opportunities and explore them to value-creating business ventures.

In conclusion, a start-up founder with good technical skill but without entrepreneurship skills is like a hen laying non fertile eggs resulting from lack of mating with a cock. A start-up founder with good technical skill and good entrepreneurship skills without business incubation and linkages is likened to a hen incubating her fertile eggs using the natural process which is not scalable. Such start-ups will struggle for so long. A start-up founder that passed through Business Incubation and possesses technical skill and entrepreneurship skills is likened to a commercial egg incubator that can deliver large number of high quality day-old-chicks. If you are to choose, which scenario do you prefer?

Business Linkages

The business world can be likened to an ecosystem; a system formed by the interaction of a community of organisms with their physical environment. This interaction involves both the living organism and the non-living components. Take for example, the aquatic ecosystem contains plants such as water lily, water hyacinth plan, flowers, weeds, animals such as frogs, fish, reptiles, hawks, vultures etc., air, water, sand and other components. Naturally all these components of the ecosystem are linked together for a sustainable lifespan. While animals are predators, other are preys and serve as for others to survive. The hawk or eagle for instance, are predators that hunts and feeds on fish or smaller animals. Several other predators feed on fish, this is why the number of fish in the ecosystem outnumbers the predators. Nature creates a balance between the interactions of the components of the ecosystem for its sustainability.

The fish feeds on small plants and smaller fish in the rivers, the hawk, crocodile and alligators hunts the fish. The predators compete for the pray just like SMEs compete for customers. Bigger fish swallow smaller likewise, bigger organizations acquires or merge with smaller organizations. This is why some predators cannot be found in some areas where there is scarcity of food. This is the same reason why SMEs are located close to the source of raw materials. This is referred to as food chain. A food chain is a linear network of links in a food web starting from producer organisms (such as grass or trees which use radiation from the Sun to make their food) and ending at apex predator species (like hawks grizzly bears or killer whales), detritivores (like earthworms or woodlice), or decomposer species (such as fungi or bacteria). In business ecosystem context, the producer organisms are the SMEs, producing for the bigger consumers. A food chain also shows how the organisms are related with each other by the food they eat. Each level of a food chain represents a different trophic level. A food chain differs from a food web, because the complex network of different animals' feeding relations are aggregated and the chain only follows a direct, linear pathway of one animal at a time. Natural interconnections between food chains make it a food web.

In our business ecosystem, the food chain is synonymous to the supply chain which is a system of organizations, people, activities, information, and resources involved in moving a product or service from supplier to customer. Supply chain activities involve the transformation of natural resources, raw materials, and components into a finished product that is delivered to the end customer. In sophisticated supply chain systems, used products may re-enter the supply chain at any point where residual value is recyclable. Supply chains link value chains.

A business ecosystem is an economic community supported by a foundation of interacting organizations and individuals, this are the organisms of the business world. The economic community produces goods and services of value to consumers or customers, who are themselves members of the business ecosystem. The member organisms also include suppliers, lead producers, manufacturers, competitors, and other stakeholders. Over time, they co-create and coevolve their capabilities and roles, and tend to align themselves with the directions set by one or more central companies or government regulatory agencies. Those companies holding leadership roles may change over time, but the function of ecosystem leader is valued by the community because it enables members to move toward shared visions to align their investments, and to find mutually supportive roles.

A business ecosystem is a dynamic structure of interconnected organizations that depend on each other for mutual survival.

This can be divided into three: Core business which is typically considered to be part of the organization or those inside the organization’s wall plus distribution channels and direct suppliers.

Extended Enterprise: Those include direct customers, standard bodies, and suppliers of complimentary products

Business Ecosystem: Those who have significant effect on the core business but are often considered afterthoughts or considered as outsiders e.g. trade associations, regulatory bodies, unions, investors etc.

Business linkages between Small and Medium-Sized Enterprises (SMEs) and affiliates of big companies and bulk buyer can potentially improve development, especially for the low-income groups within developing countries. Linkages with other firms help SMEs to learn new and better production methods and can help to increase SME employment and access to market. For their part, big companies often rely on good quality and timely local supplies. Well-developed suppliers can stimulate more investment and help to improve the developmental impact of Foreign Direct Investment (Te Velde, 2002b). Thus, it is time to assess initiatives that promote linkages, and to scale up successful initiatives. This note suggests that one such route can be the inclusion of a linkages fund based on sound principles. There is a great benefit of business linkages within clusters. More recently the emphasis has shifted to how clusters are inserted within global value chains (Humphrey, 2001). This can be done by developing linkages across and within countries. This article focuses on linkages within Nigeria and other countries.

The Biggest challenge SMEs face is not funding, funding is just one of the key success factor. Business ecosystem provides an enabling environment for SMEs think big, start small and scale fast in a sustainable manner. A good business linkage program will connect SMEs to the right organization in the ecosystem that is capable of providing timely support to various challenges. A sustainable business linkage program should have at its core or at least be interconnect to reputable business hubs such as city chamber of commerce e.g. Egi City Chamber of Commerce.

In conclusion, nature has made it such that the preys always outnumbers the predators. In high income countries, SMEs contributes about 65% to employment and 51% to GDP. In poor or low income countries, SME contribute about 31% to employment and 15% to GDP, this is an indication of an imbalance in the business ecosystem. This calls for a rapid entrepreneurship development program by credible organizations such as Central bank of Nigeria (CBN). Also a credible and sustainable business linkage program is a critical requirement for SME development in Nigeria. The PIND Business linkage program is one of the most credible and successful business linkage program available. While entrepreneurship development programs develops the capability of SMEs to transform their ideas into a business venture, a Business Linkage program will provide SME assessment, guide, mentor, and support the SME to survive in the hash business environment. The absence of Business linkage is the reason while SMEs fail after few years. Business Development Service Providers (BDSP) such as Entrepreneurship & Innovation Centre, Shield Academy Partners Limited and CAD Consulting Limited, are key resources for building the capability and capacity of the SME. This is the right time for you to start or expand your business leveraging on the rich business ecosystem.

From Oil to Tech – Connecting the dots to the New Industrial Era. A new opportunity for Startups to Thrive

"If I can’t make money without money, it may be difficult to make money with money. You may not really need that money, you need a better strategy. "#BLESS_MENTORSHIP_CLASS

I start by saying that money is always a distraction when it comes before an idea is conceived. The presence of money greatly influences the decision to start up lean, not to mention having excess money. Oil has impacted our lives in very many ways without any doubt, but it has also destroyed us in so many ways. Too much focus on oil killed our innovations in other sectors and shielded us away from researching the future. When most people are able to meet up with their needs and provide for their families with extra cash in the bank, they hardly think of innovating to make extra cash. Something applies to Nigeria as a nation.

Apart from the fact that oil can be exhausted, there are strong market forces that can make is worth much less than is usually budgeted for. This is our current reality. Smart economy such as Dubai, strengthen other industries from the revenue generated from oil. The Nigerian economy has been too dependent on oil, but the paradigm has shifted as major consumer are already exploring renewable energy. This has led to hardship in the nation, but it depends on how you want to look at it, as a problem or as opportunities?

In the last one year, I have received more people coming to seek for advice on how their ideas can become products or services than in the last 10 years. We now wake up every day with new ideas that can solve problems in our society. This is survival instinct in action. This is good for us provided we implement the ideas with technologies that make the solutions sustainable and highly scalable. As the era of oil goes into hibernation, I welcome you to the technology world of unlimited opportunities where start-ups can thrive.

In the near future, companies will meet their IT requirements simply by moving to the “cloud” and purchasing fee-based services – similar to the way they currently buy other services such as electricity’. This opens a new frontier for tech start-ups to spring up. In my own view, one of the biggest technological breakthroughs in recent time is cloud computing. Simply put, Cloud Computing is a business-friendly technology that is a perfect fit for start-ups. Clearly, cloud computing is simply remote computing. First and foremost, how does it work?

In the beginning, there were computers and software. Whenever a company wants to use a software for it business operations, its needs to purchase the software completely and install it on local computers. When new features are added to the software, the company needs to upgrade the software so as to keep up to date. As new software features are added, more computing power is required. This means, every two years, the computer hardware has to be upgraded in order to support the upgraded software. But due to lack of resources, many businesses never upgrade as required. The cost of upgrading includes the cash to purchase the new version, the cost of retraining employees and the cost of upgrading the hardware based on the new requirements of the software, and sometimes the cost of migrating to the new software.

Today, software for business are available in the cloud at very low cost with greater benefits than their counterparts. Taking electricity as an example, why would you want to generate your own electricity when you can easily connect to the grid and pay for what you consume? The total cost of ownership of a software solution is not limited to the cost of the license, there are several other cost elements. The cloud helps businesses eliminate these costs to a very high degree. A good reason for migrating to cloud environment is due to reduction of cost, ease of use and painless IT operations.

With technology, start-ups can grow and scale up their businesses faster and more visible to the global community. With good support from government and technology incubators or accelerator programs, more technology start-ups can be created with real problem solving solutions. Such solutions can be hosted in the cloud for global visibility.

In low income countries, tech start-ups contribute very little or nothing to employment and to GDP because they are almost not existing, in middle income countries, tech start-ups have some significant impact on employment and on GDP and in high income countries, tech start-ups contributes immensely to employment and to GDP. This clearly shows that the more successful start-ups we create, the better for our economy. ICT happens to be one of the fastest ways to develop viable start-ups that can yield quick and remarkable impact on the economy.

In conclusion, technology such as cloud computing has impacted the business world and is changing the way we do business because of its cost effective nature and the productivity it provides. This provides huge market opportunity for tech start-ups to boom because ideas rule the world. Let’s move from oil to a technology driven economy. Finally, my desire is to see more start-ups in the cloud because, DATA IS THE NEXT OIL.

Innovation in Agriculture

Innovation in agriculture is characterized by Intensive farming (Intensive Crop and Livestock Farming), low fallow ratio and higher use of inputs such as capital and labour per unit land area. This is in contrast to traditional agriculture in which the inputs per unit land are lower.

Intensive crop farming is a modern form of intensive farming that refers to the industrialized production of crops. Intensive crop farming's methods include innovation in agricultural machinery, farming methods, genetic engineering technology, techniques for achieving economies of scale in production, the creation of new markets for consumption, patent protection of genetic information, and global trade. These methods are widespread in developed nations.

Intensive animal husbandry involves either large numbers of animals raised on limited land, usually confined animal feeding operations often referred to as factory farms. This increase the yields of food and fiber per acre as compared to traditional animal husbandry.

Intensive crop agriculture is characterised by innovations designed to increase yield. Techniques include planting multiple crops per year, reducing the frequency of fallow years and improving cultivars. It also involves increased use of fertilizers, plant growth regulators, pesticides and mechanization, controlled by increased and more detailed analysis of growing conditions, including weather, soil, water, weeds and pests.

Smaller intensive farms usually include higher inputs of labour and more often use sustainable intensive methods. The farming practices commonly found on such farms are referred to as appropriate technology. These farms are less widespread in both developed countries and worldwide, but are growing more rapidly. Most of the food available in specialty markets such as farmers markets is produced by these smallholder farms.

Let us take a look at some innovations in agriculture:

Livestock production

Food and water is delivered to the animals, and therapeutic use of antimicrobial agents, vitamin supplements and growth hormones are often employed. Growth hormones are not used on chickens nor on any animal in some countries. Undesirable behaviours often related to the stress of confinement led to a search for docile breeds (e.g., with natural dominance behaviours bred out), physical restraints to stop interaction, such as individual cages for chickens, or physically modification such as the de-beaking of chickens to reduce the harm of fighting.

Seeds

In the 1970s scientists created strains of maize, wheat, and rice that are generally referred to as high-yielding varieties (HYV). HYVs have an increased nitrogen-absorbing potential compared to other varieties. Since cereals that absorbed extra nitrogen would typically lodge (fall over) before harvest, semi-dwarfing genes were bred into their genomes. The first widely implemented HYV rice to be developed was created through a cross between an Indonesian variety named “Peta” and a Chinese variety named “Dee Geo Woo Gen.”

Crop rotation

Crop rotation or crop sequencing is the practice of growing a series of dissimilar types of crops in the same space in sequential seasons for benefits such as avoiding pathogen and pest build up that occurs when one species is continuously cropped. Crop rotation also seeks to balance the nutrient demands of various crops to avoid soil nutrient depletion. A traditional component of crop rotation is the replenishment of nitrogen through the use of legumes and green manure in sequence with cereals and other crops. Crop rotation can also improve soil structure and fertility by alternating deep-rooted and shallow-rooted plants. One technique is to plant multi-species cover crops between commercial crops. This combines the advantages of intensive farming with continuous cover and polyculture.

Irrigation

Crop irrigation accounts for 70% of the world's fresh water use. Flood irrigation, the oldest and most common type, is typically unevenly distributed, as parts of a field may receive excess water in order to deliver sufficient quantities to other parts. Overhead irrigation, using center-pivot or lateral-moving sprinklers, gives a much more equal and controlled distribution pattern. Drip irrigation is the most expensive and least-used type, but delivers water to plant roots with minimal losses. We also have some home grown sprinkler irrigation system with full automation, remote monitoring, remote control and weather sensitivity.

Water catchment management measures include recharge pits, which capture rainwater and runoff and use it to recharge groundwater supplies. This helps in the replenishment of groundwater wells and eventually reduces soil erosion. Dammed rivers creating Reservoirs store water for irrigation and other uses over large areas. Smaller areas sometimes use irrigation ponds or groundwater.

Aquaculture

Aquaculture is the cultivation of the natural products of water (fish, shellfish, algae, seaweed and other aquatic organisms). Innovation has made intensive aquaculture take place on land using tanks, ponds or other controlled systems or in the ocean, using cages.

This is another innovation that have been developed to slow the deterioration of agricultural land and even regenerate soil health and ecosystem services, while still offering high yields. Most of these developments fall in the category of organic farming, or the integration of organic and conventional agriculture.

"Organic systems and the practices that make them effective are being picked up more and more by conventional agriculture and will become the foundation for future farming systems. They won't be called organic, because they'll still use some chemicals and still use some fertilizers, but they'll function much more like today's organic systems than today's conventional systems."

Weed Control

In agriculture, systematic weed management is usually required, often performed by machines such as cultivators or liquid herbicide sprayers. Herbicides kill specific targets while leaving the crop relatively unharmed. Some of these act by interfering with the growth of the weed and are often based on plant hormones. Weed control through herbicide is made more difficult when the weeds become resistant to the herbicide. Innovations to solve this challenge include:

The use of Computer-aided management for farm production operations has become a necessity at all levels of farming. Our management software helps us monitor every aspect of production, locking out wastes and yielding higher profits than the conventional farm record-keeping methods. The key factor contributing to the success of CAD Digital Farm Limited is in the use of our state-of-the-art farm management solution called "CADERPTM LifeTimeTM".

LifeTimeTM software manages finance, inventory, employees, customers, suppliers, and mechanization of your farms and fields. Listed below are some of the features of this solution:

Manage and maintain all farm records including animal profile for all types of animals, monitoring and control of the pens in real time.

Who is the Ultimate Developer

Object Oriented Programming (OOP) is a programming paradigm that is based on the concept of “objects”. Objects are entities that contain data and the code that can manipulate the data. The data is usually represented as fields or attributes or properties while the code can be procedures, methods, functions or events. Objects are instances of a class and a class “is an internal template that defines the object. OOP is the programming paradigm that best mimics the real world. To best explain OOP concept let’s examine the scenario below:

“If you suddenly got very hungry while reading in a library for over 10 hours and the only option is to order for popcorn and a drink.”

First and foremost, you are an object with data and program to manipulate the data. As an object, you have height and weight as attributes. Eat, swallow, pick–and-chew and drink is methods of the object which are ways of doing things in reality. The moment you started getting hungry, an event called hunger was triggered within you. Your knowledge of having the contact of the popcorn shop shows the data hiding ability of the object and calling the shop with a phone executes the call method of the object using the phone number as a parameter.

While eating the popcorn, depending on how hungry you were, you could use the Pick-an-chew method in which you pick the popcorn one by one into your mouth or Pack method in which you pack plenty of the popcorn into your mouth at once. The drink method can be polymorphic in nature since you can either drink directly from the bottle or use a cup or straw. The mouth does not know what method was used to get the drink. When you get full, your stomach deactivates your appetite and your mouth rejects the excess food. Your eating ability might have been inherited from your parents. The eating habit may be present in your siblings since you all originated from the same parent (base class)

What I just described is a developer’s explanation of how God wired our body system. The power of OOP, the clarity and procedural nature of structured programing can be combined to abstract the real world scenarios.

Common-sense is common in human but not common in machines. To give machines common-sense, we need Artificial Intelligence (AI). “Artificial Intelligence is the field of computer science that seeks to build autonomous machines—machines that can carry out complex tasks without human intervention. Simply put, AI in the form of intelligence demonstrated by software or machines. It is also the name given to the field of study in computer science that seek to studies how to produce computers software and computer with the ability to exhibit intelligent behaviour. The implementation of AI revolves around intelligent agents. An agent is an intelligent system that understands the environment in which it exists and performs actions to optimize its possibilities of success in the environment. “Artificial intelligence agents and robots occupy human society with protection and support from humanity-based rights, then the principal message of these core human responsibilities will apply equally to the non-human artificial intelligence and robots, with the stipulated modification that human needs are to be prioritized over artificial intelligence and robot needs.”

From my view as a developer, plants, animals and human are objects instances of classes templates designed and implemented by God, of which human is real instance /image of God. We are an instance of a running programs in the world as our operating hardware environment. The human brain is the central processing unit coordination all our actions and reaction through our nervous system.

In conclusion, on many occasions God uses the subjects and objects of His creation to illustrate His nature, His attributes (properties), as well as His plan (design) and purpose (process) for our lives. God is the ultimate developer.